Five dead in Rio high-rise collapse

Pictures of the collapsed buildings

Google Maps, location of Teatro Municipal

These economic frictions are readily apparent to anyone who does business in Brazil.  One of my friends in Rio used to operate a company specializing in helping foreigners navigate the Brazilian scene.  I encountered some of these difficulties myself when I attempted to sue a Brazilian company.  It soon became evident that the Brazilian legal system lends itself to endless delay and obstruction.  Eventually, my Brazilian lawyer gave up.

On page 215 of the novel Farewell Rio, Kate illustrates the phenomenon:

John was so busy he had to leave the details of renting the apartment to me. It wasn’t simply a matter of signing a lease, as it would have been in New York. I had to obtain letters of reference and gather all sorts of notarized documents.

In the 1990s following Glasnost, many U.S. accounting firms and law firms opened offices in Moscow with the intention of helping the Russians learn how to run a modern capitalist economy.  Their efforts were largely a bust, and they should have known better.  A smoothly functioning modern economy can’t just be thrown together over night.  It depends on an immense network of laws, customs, shared assumptions and institutions.  The lawyers who hurried to Moscow were better positioned than most people to appreciate this because they earned their livings in the U.S. by helping their clients deal with this complex network.

For example, all fifty states in the U.S. have adopted a uniform set of state laws, the Uniform Commercial Code.  Suppose, for example, an appliance store sells a refrigerator for a series of installment payments.  If the customer defaults on the payments, the appliance store can repossess the refrigerator.  However, the store has a legitimate concern that the customer might use the refrigerator to secure another loan, and that the second lender might repossess it first.  The Uniform Commercial Code specifies how the appliance store can protect itself against such double dealing.  The Uniform Commercial Code is hundreds of pages long, it is continuously updated, and it was originally the result of decades of work by committees of legal scholars and practicing lawyers.  Without such complex laws and institutions, a modern economy cannot function efficiently.

Brazil has a long way to go.

It would be wonderful if Google has published street level views of the site of the former John Kennedy Hotel on Bananal Island by the time I get around illustrating the scene in Farewell Rio where Kate and John visit that hotel.  At present, the best I can find are aerial views.

The Post’s article provides an amusing illustration of a longstanding Brazilian conspiracy theory — the idea that the United States intends to attack or otherwise seize control over the Amazon — an obsession that may sometimes have served to give the Brazilian Army something to do.

So far (October 22, 2011), my wife and I have attended only the film VIPs.  It is reminiscent of the American film Catch Me If You Can — both films are based on the exploits of real con men and impersonators.  Catch Me If You Can was more informative about the mechanisms of cons and impersonations and about the police work that led to the capture of the con artist.  My wife and I and one other member of the audience whom we interviewed found VIPs not unpleasant, but not outstanding.  I would rate it as moderately interesting.  For the foreigner, VIPs is neither very revealing of Brazilian culture nor very useful as a travelogue.  Although the protagonist is neither sympathetic nor fully sane, I found myself rooting for him to get away with some of his exploits.  Evidently, he had some real talent, but not much sense about how to deploy it.

Today (October 23, 2011) we saw Malu on a Bicycle.  I enjoyed it.  My wife did not.  In contrast with VIPs, I think this film offers the foreigner both some insight into Brazilian culture and some interesting views of São Paulo, plus a coconut-seller’s stand on the beach at Leblon in Rio de Janeiro.  The plot is not new — love, jealousy, loss.  The themes of obsessive casual sex, parties, machismo and jealousy do in fact represent a part of the Brazilian reality.  Some of these same themes distressed Kate Lawrence, the protagonist of Farewell Rio, in 1968, and were part of the mixture of love and impatience she felt toward Brazil.  At least one of our Brazilian friends bears some resemblance, at times, to Luiz, the protagonist of the film Malu on a Bicycle, and Luiz’s jealousy bears some resemblance to that of Sérgio, Kate Lawrence’s former lover in the novel Farewell Rio.

At previous Brazilian film festivals in Washington, we have seen some films like Central Station and City of God that subsequently had successful commercial releases in the United States.  I doubt that any of the six films presented at the Fifth Annual Brazilian Film Week will have commercial releases in the United States, particularly not the film we saw tonight (October 25, 2011), Reflections of a Blender.  We thought it expressed a peculiarly Brazilian sensibility that would not travel well.  Perhaps, for that reason, it may be the most informative for the foreigner of the three films we have seen.  The film is set in São Paulo.  It’s narrator is a kitchen blender.  The film is a gruesome horror story, played for laughs.  The characters are decidedly unglamorous.  Most of the action takes place in a neighborhood that looks clean, but not prosperous.  As in Malu on a Bicycle, philandering and jealousy are central to the action.

For a brief list of some our our favorite Brazilian films, see this posting.

In its place is a new widget showing current (2011) images of sites mentioned in the novel Farewell Rio together with appropriate quotes from the text.  These photos will provide a visual tour of the story.  Click the image to go to a page with more information about it,  including its source.  Click the Quick Link “Photos illustrating Farewell Rio” to see a more comprehensive collection of these photos.